A U.N. report reveals the regime's abuses—and criticizes its enablers in Beijing.

Feb. 17, 2014 12:50 p.m. ET

A United Nations panel on Monday released a major new report on human rights in North Korea—and some of the ways Pyongyang's friends compound its abuses. The persuasive power of the report is its breadth and detail documenting the Kim family regime's depredations, and it is notable to see the U.N. weighing in so substantively and, in one important instance, so explicitly.

The Commission of Inquiry led by Australian judge Michael Kirby offers abundant evidence of crimes against humanity, based on hundreds of statements received from defectors and other experts and public hearings around the world. The report says the regime exercises control based on the brutal use of force and a system known as songbun based on social class, birth and political loyalty.

Regime control is so pervasive that it determines where everyone can live and work, what they can watch or listen to, and even the food they have access to. "Citizens are punished for watching and listening to foreign broadcasts, including foreign films and soap operas," says the report, and Christianity is persecuted in particular.

Food is used as a means of political control, in service with ideological indoctrination, which contributed to mass starvation in the 1990s and "hunger and malnutrition continue to be widespread." The report estimates that the regime holds between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners "in four larger political prison camps." There used to be more camps and prisoners, but "hundreds of thousands" have "perished in these camps over the past five decades." Arbitrary arrest, torture and execution are common.

The evidence is gruesome, but the commission goes awry in recommending that dictator Kim Jong-un and other officials be tried at the International Criminal Court. Regime change is the only way to free North Koreans from their government's abusive control, and once they are free they will deserve a say in deciding how to secure justice against their oppressors. The ICC demand may make it less likely that some in the regime might defect or stage an internal coup lest they end up in the Hague too.

The commission does better in naming and shaming Pyongyang's accomplices in Beijing. This report marks the first major mention of China by name in a U.N. assessment of North Korea. The panel documents Beijing's policy of repatriating North Korean defectors who have fled into China.

Beijing insists on classifying these individuals as "economic migrants" and returning them, even though they face years in Pyongyang's gulag for the political crime of trying to flee tyranny. In some cases, the panel notes, Beijing further endangers the refugees by sharing information about them and their contacts with North Korean authorities.

This contravenes Beijing's commitments under the U.N. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which prohibits deporting refugees to areas where they would face danger. Beijing's policy also exposes defectors to further abuse after they have escaped North Korea. Commissioners heard many stories of North Korean defectors exploited by human traffickers—including women sold as brides to Chinese men—a problem exacerbated by the refugees' forced underground existence.

China's behavior is not a secret, but previous U.N. reports have tiptoed around the issue, referring only to "third countries" that should improve their treatment of defectors. If the U.N. panel's new bluntness signals growing international impatience with Beijing's mistreatment of North Koreans, so much the better.

The report ought to inspire more realism in dealing with North Korea, especially among those in Washington who think Pyongyang can be trusted to negotiate an end to its nuclear program, or that Beijing can be trusted to help. The report's findings underscore that Western policy should focus on squeezing the regime with a goal of toppling it, while in the meantime doing whatever is possible to encourage the exodus of its people.

A new U.N. report erases any doubts or excuses that might have been made for the murderous Pyongyang regime.

By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Feb. 18, 2014 7:15 p.m. ET
In the past there were excuses for those inclined to ignore or deny the horrors the Democratic People's Republic of Korea routinely visits upon its subjects. Defectors have an ax to grind, we were told. American intelligence is making up stories, and Pyongyang's foreign enemies stand to profit from these tales.

There is nowhere for North Korea's apologists to hide now. The 200,000-word, nearly 400-page report released Monday by the "commission of inquiry" for the United Nations Human Rights Council, led by the Australian jurist Michael Kirby, in effect presents the world with the black book on North Korean communism.

The report is a careful but shocking document, the result of a year-long investigation, based on public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington, public testimony from more than 80 witnesses and an additional 240 private interviews. Much of the material is based on firsthand testimony of escapees from this hell on Earth.

"The gravity, scale and nature of these violations . . . does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," the report says. It charges the North Korean government with "crimes against humanity" and urges international action. The question to those of us beyond the reach of the North Korean regime is: Now that we know this terrible truth, what do we do about it?

Just as the Soviets had the gulag system of political prison camps, so too does the rule-by-terror Communist government in Pyongyang maintain a North Korean version with dozens of camps.

Some of the most chilling passages concern the North Korean penal system—especially its dreaded kyohwaso (prison camps) and even more brutal kwanliso (political prison camps). The horrors begin with detention and interrogation centers, where people are initially detained after being accused of crimes against the state by the security services. (North Korea has more than one set of secret police.)

The charges are often of the most trivial or arbitrary variety—one witness said he was arrested for the crime of misspelling Kim Il Sung's name when typing. The detainees are routinely brutalized, with cruelties large and small. "An old woman who had no shoes and asked for shoes in order to work," the report says, "was told by the SSD agents that she did not deserve shoes because the detainees were animals and should die soon." Then she was beaten until bloody.

In the prison camps, conditions are still more sadistic and dehumanizing. Starvation and torture are the norm, sexual abuse of women routine. Most who are sent to these camps can expect to perish there. Concludes the report: "According to the Commission's findings, hundreds of thousands of inmates have been exterminated in political prison camps and other places over a span of more than five decades."

The report suggests that North Korea's prison-camp population has fallen in recent years—from perhaps 150,000-200,000 in the 1990s and early 2000s to perhaps 80,000-130,000 today. (The latter estimates and some other findings mentioned in the U.N. report come from Human Rights in North Korea, an organization that I helped start.) The cause of the drop isn't clear, but the report speculates that one reason is that tens of thousands sent to the camps have died there over the decades.

Many will wonder how the North Korean regime can treat their countrymen as if they were little more than insects. Readers of the U.N. report will understand: Such disregard of human life is encouraged by the deep logic of the state.

Alone among the world's governments, Pyongyang oversees a system known as songbun: a practice that assigns a class background to North Koreans with exquisite care, stamping them with one of over 50 gradations. The top groups are considered "core" and are highly favored by the state.

The lowest groups are branded as "hostile" classes ("complex" classes, in more recent security-system taxonomy). These unfortunates—who may bear such hereditary curses as relatives in South Korea or ancestors who were landlords, or Christians—are held in permanent suspicion as would-be "enemies of the people," a treasonous condition in which one forfeits all humanity.

The songbun system, carefully described in this report, helps to explain the merciless starvation of the state's enemies within the prison camps as well as in the population at large during the Great Famine of the 1990s: Countless victims from that hunger were members of the "hostile" classes, whose deaths the regime regarded as a matter of no concern.

A state with so little respect for its own subjects might hardly be expected to confer respect on citizens of other countries. And Pyongyang does not, as the regime's extraordinary, routinized practice of kidnapping foreigners attests. The U.N. report devotes nearly 50 pages to documenting "abductions" and "enforced disappearances." At least some victims of these modern-day slaving raids are spirited off to the intelligence services to help agents with foreign-language skills. South Korea and Japan are most often raided, but the U.N. report documents abductions in China, Thailand, Malaysia and even as far as Lebanon and France.

One of the most grotesque details in the U.N. report is the documentation of North Korea's policy of violent forced abortion. This unspeakable atrocity is visited on women in prison camps—especially refugees who have been forcibly returned from China, bearing a half-Chinese fetus. Here, North Korean reality is even more gruesome than the report fully seems to recognize. State-promoted race-hatred is taught alongside worship of the Kim dynasty to every North Korean schoolchild from the earliest age of instruction. The unforgivable crime that sentenced these women to involuntary abortion—and their progeny to death—was their defiling of the sacred Korean minjok, or race.

The U.N. report accuses many units of the North Korean government—including its supreme leadership—of being responsible for state-sponsored crimes that include "extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape and other grave sexual violence." Foremost among the report's many recommendations is that the North Korean leadership be held accountable for these crimes through prosecution at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, or through a special international tribunal established for this purpose.

Given the bombshell report, democratic governments and independent organizations can no longer act as if they did not know. Their dealings with Pyongyang must always be considered in light of this damning document. Now is the time for the never agains:

Never again should Western humanitarian aid be given to North Korea to hand out at its own discretion, as if Pyongyang were a government like any other.

Never again must Beijing—which like Pyongyang refused to cooperate with the U.N. investigation—be given a free pass for financing, enabling and protecting this most odious of all regimes. Challenge China to veto the referral for crimes against humanity on the U.N. Security Council, and let Beijing go on record defending state-sponsored mass murder. Make the Chinese veto it 20 times if they dare. Beijing is highly sensitive to public shaming, and it must be shamed and penalized for its indefensible support of Pyongyang until it cuts its client-state loose.

Never again must South Koreans avert their eyes from the catastrophe that is befalling their compatriots across the demilitarized zone. And never again must Seoul forget that it is legally bound to grant citizenship to refugees from the nightmare to the North.

Never again must the rest of us live comfortably with the knowledge of what is happening right now to ordinary people in North Korea.

Mr. Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute, is a visiting scholar at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul and a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

...SEOUL, South Korea — Almost everything American intelligence agencies and North Korea-watchers thought they understood two years ago about Kim Jong-un, the North’s young leader, turns out to have been wrong……..

…….As a result, when Mr. Obama lands here on Friday on the second stop of his Asia tour, he will be confronting the question of whether his strategy of “strategic patience” with the North has been overtaken by reality: an unpredictable, though calculating, ruler in Mr. Kim, who has proved to be more ruthless, aggressive and tactically skilled than anyone expected…….

With his buzz haircut and high-heeled shoes, Kim Jong Un is an easy target for ridicule. But jokers beware: Kim does not enjoy ribbing. Ask Sony Pictures, the victim of a damaging cyberattack last week.

On Christmas day, Sony is due to release a Seth Rogen comedy that mocks Kim. The North Korean state news agency has condemned “The Interview” as an “act of war.” “This act of not fearing any punishment from Heaven is touching off the towering hatred and wrath of the service personnel and people of the D.P.R.K.,” the propaganda organ thundered in June.

It appears Pyongyang wasn’t kidding. Hackers broke into the computers of Sony Pictures, which produced “The Interview,” and stole newly released and unreleased films, as well as sensitive documents.

Some computer security experts believe North Korea is behind the attack. The intrusion featured some of the same Korean-language malware that Kim’s minions used to take down television and bank networks in South Korea about two years ago.

That’s hardly conclusive evidence since hackers often share their tools. But the North Korean mission to the United Nations didn’t deny responsibility, coyly telling the BBC, “I kindly advise you to just wait and see.”

If Kim did order the cyberhit it will confirm North Korea’s reputation for perversity. In retaliation for a movie that portrays him as a reclusive, overly sensitive evil dictator he responds . . . like a reclusive, overly sensitive evil dictator.

Amusing as this affair is, it’s a reminder that the North gets nasty when it feels provoked. Its agents have staged assassinations and kidnappings around the world. Last week Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, warned that in addition to nuclear warheads and the missiles needed to strike the U.S., Kim is making progress on new asymmetric weapons. These include drones, submarines, and biological and chemical warfare.

While such weapons might not change the outcome of a conflict, they may make war more likely. Gen. Scaparrotti warned that “Kim Jong Un, unlike his father Kim Jong Il, is overconfident and unpredictable.” Crazy dictators can be funny but they are always dangerous.

Critics of the Iran nuclear deal often point to Bill Clinton’s nuclear accord with North Korea as a reference point for what we can expect next, and this week we were given a fresh lesson on that score. Satellite imagery shows Pyongyang is reactivating its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, and now the regime has publicly threatened to produce more bombs and test another long-range ballistic missile.

That isn’t the nuclear-free future Mr. Clinton promised in 1994, when he claimed “the entire world will be safer” thanks to a deal that required Pyongyang to “freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program.” Oh well. For now, the interesting question is why Pyongyang is again rattling its nuclear saber. There may be an Iran angle here, too.

Put yourself in Kim Jong Un’s Gucci loafers. Your economy is in worse shape than usual, you’re unsure of your grip on power, and you’ve recently executed your fourth defense minister in three years. What’s a young dictator to do?

Iran provides an intriguing model. Here a regime that had its own recent brush with severe economic distress succeeded in parlaying its nuclear program into a diplomatic bonanza. This includes the removal of most sanctions, tens of billions in cash, hundreds of billions in potential investment, the retention of most of its nuclear infrastructure, and the promise of an eventual lifting of an arms embargo. Iran didn’t even have to change its bellicose rhetoric or behavior to get a deal, and the U.N. will let it inspect some of its own military sites.

That must seem like a sweet deal to Kim, which may be why he’s drawing attention to his nuclear arsenal in classic North Korean fashion. The fact that the Obama Presidency has only 16 months to go must add urgency to his diplomatic calculus. He needs to act fast if he wants a deal before a new U.S. President takes over. If a deal is reached, Kim knows that he can then violate it at will without paying too steep a price.

We have praised President Obama’s reluctance to negotiate with Pyongyang. Still, if a regime without nuclear weapons can reap such a windfall, it’s no wonder that the nuclear North might think it can do even better. Given what this Administration showed it was willing to concede to Tehran, watch for Kim to keep acting up to lure the U.S. back to the negotiating table.